Man-Flu

Man Flu.  Man Cold.  Influenza Masculinus. Every winter, whatever you want to call it, this raging infirmity seizes us like a junkyard dog to the throat, and breathes its dead-fish canine breath in our faces. There’s no known cure, yet it is indelibly scrawled across our winters (some unfortunates have been known to fall in summertime). The following account is written by a bona-fide sufferer of man-flu.

I write this in a childish scrawl. It’s hit my nervous system I see, the end can’t be far off. It takes my best efforts to steady my good hand enough to put the pen to paper at all.

Yesterday I noticed a tickly sensation in my ears and throat.  I thought nothing of it; after all you wouldn’t worry about an unusual lump in a tender place, at least not at first.  “It’s nothing,” I told myself, “just some dust in the sinuses”.  Nothing to be alarmed about.

This morning I woke in a different place: that awful corridor of a slow, rotting end.  I’m down with man-flu. The least I can do is write my memoirs.  Even that is hard, the ink is blotting as my body fatally desiccates itself through nose, eyes and ears.

I occasionally drift into a sleep annotated with delusions cartooning my predicament.  Just now I woke from a dream where I was stood on the battlements of a besieged fort, hurling buckets of boiling lemsip onto the invaders below.  The fort was spongy underfoot like a big bouncy castle of angry flesh.

Freeze-frame mid-sneeze.  See that expression?  A bitter scream, warning fellow men of the contagious peril I present. I have chewed up enough throat lozenges to rot my teeth and I wonder what would happen if I ate too many.  Gastro-intestinal distress of such magnitude the house has to be torn down in fear of a latter-day Chernobyl?  Perhaps they are habit-forming: I will be freebasing with the soothing liquid centres before long. Anyway I will find out, as I throw another wrapper onto the growing pile of papery junk beside my bed. 

I think I should tidy up, but I’m gravely ill, I can feel my heart pounding and my head feels full of filthy steam.  One more throat sweet should - oh no, I’ve run out! I shuffle into the cold outdoors all snug and warm in my duvet.  I can’t think of anyone being arrested for dressing in a duvet, although embarrassing exposes in the local papers are the last of my concerns now.  I make a mental note to burn the blankets later, it’s the least I can do for the remining human race.

Need.  Menthol.  Relief. Several OAPs look the other way as we cross paths; the sight of the half-dead in shrouds evidently touching a raw nerve. Here we are, K & M News and Food, I nearly passed it in my delerium.  I draw a hacking breath to greet the proprietor but he pulls his shirt over his face, exposing a pale hairy belly.  “Take everything you want and go!” he screeched through his polo shirt, backing off into his storeroom.  “Don’t come any closer!” I understood. 

I filled the pockets of my dressing gown under the duvet with 2 of each of the cold remedies on the counter before me.  It seemed important to mix the colours for some reason, kind of like you do with your veg.

Back in the house, faced with my infectious ignonomy I could see only one course of action.  It’s my social responsibility to fellow men that I quarantine myself fully.  I lie restlessly counting the days with only pompous radio plays for company. Outside, children point at the X mark I have placed on my door.  Their fathers silence them and hurry along. 

Perhaps somebody will find this diary entry in another time, an age where men can live free from the scourge of man-flu. The author has since made a full recovery.